


baby, won't you please

by goldfishtobleroneandamitie



Series: sirens will sing (music of the spheres) [4]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Enjolras is oblivious and Feuilly is uncomfortable, F/M, glassesporn for Rachel, tattoos got in there too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 06:53:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfishtobleroneandamitie/pseuds/goldfishtobleroneandamitie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Eponine is late for class, and Combeferre is unconsciously sexy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	baby, won't you please

**Author's Note:**

  * For [got_spunk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/got_spunk/gifts).



Eponine’s still not sure how they ended up in the same class. She’s two years behind him, and with the unhealthy amount of classes he takes he’s probably already set to graduate. She, on the other hand, is taking classes when she can, early in the morning and late at night, slowly chipping away at her basics a few hours at a time.

That said, Socioeconomics of the Polish Partitions isn’t exactly what she would’ve picked for a humanities credit, but it’s at the right time (the ass crack of dawn, good God), and she—surprisingly—has the only prerequisite for it.

And, of course, on the first day of class her decrepit alarm clock decides to wheeze its last.

_We've been here too long_   
_Tryin' to get along_   
_Pretendin' that you're oh so shy_   
_I'm a natural ma'am_   
_Doin' all I can_   
_My temperature is runnin' high_

She shoves the classroom door open at 8:05, out of breath and hair in her face. No one turns to look at her, already buried in their notebooks, and the professor gives her a disapproving look but doesn’t pause.

Usually in a class like this she’d sit in the back, taking notes furiously but asking no questions and volunteering little, but that’s not going to be possible here. It’s a decently sized lecture hall, big enough for fifty, but there’s only fifteen or so students (because it’s eight in the goddamn morning), and they’re all clustered in the first and second rows.

She nearly trips down the stairs when she sees Combeferre. He’s in the first row—of course he is, the nerd—eyes flicking back and forth between the professor and his notes, rapidly filling with black ink. There are no empty seats near him; Enjolras is behind him, Feuilly on his right side and a mouse-haired girl on his left.

She takes a seat across the way, two rows back, and opens her notebook. She’s about to set pen to paper, not looking forward to an hour of eighteenth-century Polish government policy, before making the mistake of looking back at Combeferre.

He’s wearing his glasses.

It’s not that he hasn’t worn his glasses _before._ Of course he has. His contacts make his eyes tired, he says, so usually by the time he’s burning the midnight oil he peers through thick lenses, back-framed, that slide down his nose periodically. Yes, Eponine has certainly seen those glasses before.

The thing is…

The thing is, Combeferre, scientist that he is, hasn’t figured out the positive correlation between his glasses and his girlfriend wanting to jump his bones. She squirms as Combeferre rubs a large hand across his mouth, still writing. Scratch that. Maybe he has.

_Cry at night_   
_No one in sight_   
_An' we got so much to share_   
_Talking's fine_   
_If you got the time_   
_But I ain't got the time to spare_   
_Yeah_

The professor is still talking, and the room, previously a perfectly acceptable temperature, has gotten very warm. But dammit, she’s paying for this class, and her ridiculously distracting boyfriend can just take his big hands and bed head and _shove it._

This resolve, surprisingly, lasts for most of class. The clock ticks away forty minutes out of fifty when Combeferre does The Thing.

The Thing, of course, being removing his glasses and sticking one earpiece in his mouth, nibbling it thoughtfully as he continues to write.

Her pen skitters across the page comically as she glares daggers at an oblivious Combeferre; his response, seemingly, is to slide the frames farther into his mouth.

Thank god there’s only ten minutes to go. She can accost him outside the door, yank those unfairly sexy glasses off his face, and…

_Do you wanna touch (Yeah)_  
 _Do you wanna touch (Yeah)_  
 _Do you wanna touch me there, where_  

Shit.

She can’t do any of that, because she has work twenty minutes after class ends, and it takes her fifteen minutes to get there.

She glances over, and Combeferre taps the end of the earpiece against his teeth.

Fuck. She’ll take ten.

The last fucking straw is when the heat apparently gets to Combeferre too. He’s wearing one of her favorite blue henleys—astronomically dressed down for him, she’s surprised he left the house—and the sleeves are tugged all the way down to his wrists, the way his button-downs normally are.

But it’s not just her, okay, it actually is hot in here. So Combeferre, after a moment of wrinkled-forehead contemplation that honestly gives her more of an affectionate flutter in her stomach than she’d care to admit to, pushes up his sleeves, and Eponine almost explodes.

Because twined around Combeferre’s forearms (and farther up, she knows from experience) are dozens of tattoos. He’d gotten the first to anger his father, he’d told her—a moth, at the fold of his right elbow. He, Enjolras, and Courfeyrac have matching ones, _Fiat lux_ etched on the underside where palm meets wrist. A Celtic knot encircled by “j’aime mieux a mѐre”, in support of Courfeyrac’s mother when she’d been battling cancer.

A caduceus down the left forearm—he’s left-handed, and he wants to be able to see it every time he performs surgery. Twenty digits of e up the right. The Ring of Power inscription in a band around his right arm, the result of a drunk dare with Courfeyrac where the center has a Legend of Zelda triangle somewhere on his body. (Jehan probably knows where, but he’s not telling). Lines from Keats in Jehan’s handwriting, spiky and slanted, _watching, with eternal lids apart,_ twined around an Euler’s triangle. Lines of text, snatches of Sappho and Plato and Ladurie, and snaking through it all sinuous curves of climbing vines.

“They don’t give up,” he’d mused, lying in bed as she traced over them. “They find footholds, create them if needed, and given enough time they can tear down walls.”

_Every girl an' boy_   
_Needs a little joy_   
_All you do is sit an' stare_   
_Beggin' on my knees_   
_Baby, won't you please_   
_Run your fingers through my hair_

“And with that, I’ll see you Wednesday.”

Eponine jerks out of her reverie with the professor’s dismissal, and looks down at her notebook. It’s nearly blank.

That’s okay, she thinks sneakily. She has her very own note-taker in this class. Said note-taker is standing to talk to the professor, so she moves to wait outside the door.

She waits demurely against the wall, waiting for the pitifully small class to filter out. She looks down when Feuilly and Enjolras come out, talking animatedly, but they don’t see her as they walk towards the stairs.

She sneaks a peek back into the hall. Combeferre is still there, next to the girl and showing the professor something in his notes. The woman scans it, raises her eyebrows and nods, saying something that seems to satisfy Combeferre. The girl from class gives a cheery wave and leaves through a door by the blackboard, followed closely by the professor.

Eponine looks around the now-empty hallway as Combeferre comes out, still absorbed in his notes but running one hand through unruly curls, and that does it. The notebook hits the floor in surprise.

 His glasses are back on his face, more’s the pity, and they slide against her nose after she reaches up, grabs the collar of his shirt, and yanks his head sideways down to hers.

He flails at first, eyes flying open, but relaxes when she runs her nails reassuringly over the nape of his neck. She shoves him back against the door, and he goes willingly, hands settling on her waist and in her hair, twining into it to hold her still and tugging, guiding until the positions are switched and it’s her back is against the wall. His glasses bump her nose again, and no matter how hot they are it’s uncomfortable—so she reaches up and tugs them off, dropping them carelessly next to her. Combeferre doesn’t seem to mind; he’s started on her neck by now, leaving biting kisses under her ear and trailing down her collarbone.

“Good morning,” he whispers against it, and her knees almost buckle. He can reduce her to a mess, damn him, and he knows it—how had she thought this was a good idea?

“G-good morning,” she gets out, going for sultry, sexy, in control. It comes out breathy and whiny instead, as she’s preoccupied by the difference in texture of Combeferre’s hair. It’s shaved at the sides from his temples back, but his curls are allowed to grow long on top, in the kind of faux-hawk that Courfeyrac bemoans (“you don’t _do_ anything with it, ‘Ferre, and you stil look like a sex god—do you know how long I work on my hair every morning?”) The shift from downy-prickly to thick and wild is fascinating, and it gives her something to concentrate on that isn’t as embarrassing as her ragged breathing. Combeferre doesn’t seem to mind, if his nip to her collarbone is any indication. She lets out a decidedly not-in-control whine, and winces at the noise in the tiled (though empty) hall. Combeferre smiles against her neck.

_My, my, my_   
_Whiskey and rye_   
_Don't it make you feel so fine_   
_Right or wrong_   
_Don't it turn you on_   
_Can't you see we're wastin' time, yeah_

An annoyed voice comes floating out of the stairwell: “Combeferre, _hurry up—_ Feuilly, why can’t I go up there?”

Combeferre lets out a huff that’s halfway between a laugh and a groan, and she giggles as she slides back down his body. Feet touching the ground, she kneels for his glasses, setting them happily on his still half-frustrated, half-aroused face.

“Morning,” she says again, grasping the reins again. She flashes him a cheeky smile, like he hadn’t had her whining against a wall less than a minute before, and he responds with a slow grin, one that she used to think was condescending or shy but that is actually just full of secrets. Combeferre is good at secrets.

He’s also good at Eponine, which makes her stomach flutter more than it should.

She hasn’t gotten his glasses quite right; one earpiece (the same one that, in his mouth, had started this entire debacle,) hanging off his ear. He moves to adjust it as she re-ties her hair with an extra band—the other having been a casualty of Combeferre’s deep love for wrapping her hair around his hands—and she catches a flash of white on his forearm.

There are only two empty spaces on Combeferre’s arms, one large enough for text on his right wrist, and the other small, only an inch or so in each direction. The large one is for childrens’ names, he’s said, or something else equally as important; but the smaller, nestled among thorny roses of Grantaire’s design, has gone unaddressed.

Until now. The space is covered with white gauze and tape, partially obscuring the tattoos around it. She touches it with one finger, raising a questioning eyebrow as he shoulders his backpack.

He smiles, but it’s not secretive now, with pink cheeks and bright red ears. “It’s not…not done healing.”

“Can I see?”

He looks like he’s about to say no, but shuts his mouth instead, presenting his forearm for inspection. She picks away at the tape with careful fingers, and after a short moment tugs away the gauze.

She feels her knees buckle again, but for a completely different reason. Nestled in among Combeferre’s tattoos, clean lines surprising next to the shading of Grantaire’s roses, is a small Fibonacci spiral.

She feels the air leave her lungs, and her eyes prickle, because it’s _hers._ It’s _her_ spiral, the first thing in math that she’d understood without his help and had talked his ear off about for a month. Hers that she’d doodled on his arm in that same spot, chattering as excitedly as she ever has about the inherent mathematics of nature.

It’s not her writing, thank goodness; her handwriting is spiky and messy, and she’d smudged her work. But it’s hers nonetheless.

She pulls Combeferre down for a searing kiss, noses bumping as the heat fades and the kiss relaxes into a smiling, affectionate one. She pulls away only to whisper, “I get off work at four.”

“I’ll be there,” he murmurs back.

She leaves him with a quick kiss and goes barreling down the stairs, past a very confused Enjolras and a half-amused, half-pained Feuilly.

She’s twenty minutes late to work. Cosette says nothing, only motions that she hitch up her collar to hide the beard burn. She feels it rub against the marks all day.

_Do you wanna touch (Yeah)_   
_Do you wanna touch (Yeah)_   
_Do you wanna touch me there, where_   
_There, yeah_

**Author's Note:**

> Song used is "Do You Wanna Touch" by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Unbetaed, so any mistakes are solely mine. I really hope you enjoyed this!
> 
> Hit me up on tumblr! Goldfishtobleroneandamitie.tumblr.com.
> 
> Cheers, gfaa


End file.
